Modern mass-market passenger vehicles may include a variety of access components that may be manually operated or power-operated, such as doors and liftgates. Moreover, power-operated components may be controlled or activated in a variety of ways, including in-vehicle controls, wireless controls, sensed user proximity and/or gestures, and combinations thereof. For example, certain doors, e.g. power-operated liftgate doors on versions of the Ford Escape vehicle, may be controlled via, in part, a motion sensor detects a particular gesture, e.g. a foot motion, in conjunction with a proximity sensor, such as a key fob sensor.
Such a system must be robustly designed to avoid false detection of activating triggers, e.g. accidentally activating based some other object or motion. However, intentional gestures may widely vary from person to person—e.g. as a person's foot motion may vary based on different heights, foot sizes, shoes, mobility, etc. As such, it is currently difficult for such a system to accommodate a wide range of intentional activating gestures and sufficiently discriminate that wide range of intentional activating gestures from false triggers.